Graziano: Marlins would love to ruin Mets' weekend

Noah K. Murray/The Star-LedgerThe Marlins want to repeat this scene as much as possible in this final series with the Mets.

NEW YORK -- It took just four pitches Friday night to remind everybody in the old, doomed, blue ballpark, in case they didn't already know, that the Cubs were gone and the weekend was going to be a whole lot tougher than Thursday night's Lou Piniella gimme.

The Florida Marlins are in town, fired up in the way that only the Mets seem to fire teams up these days. The Marlins were eliminated from playoff contention this week, but they remember what it was like to knock the Mets out on the final weekend last year and they're just dying to do it again.

"The thing that was fun was how loud the stadium was, and then how quiet it was all of a sudden," said Marlins left-hander Scott Olsen, who's slated to start Sunday's regular-season finale. "We were out of it, obviously, but hearing that silence let us know that we did something."

So the Marlins came into town ready to play, and it took four Mike Pelfrey pitches to shock everybody into that realization.

Hanley Ramirez hit the first one past a stock-still Carlos Delgado into right field for a single. He stole second base on the game's second pitch. And on the fourth, John Baker singled to left to drive in Ramirez and put the Marlins ahead 1-0.

Half of the paying customers still stuck in traffic on the Grand Central Parkway, and the home team was already down. Moments later, at approximately the same time, the Marlins scored their second run and Ryan Howard hit a three-run home run in Philadelphia.

"We knew this wasn't going to be easy," David Wright had said before the game, and it's hard to imagine a player's pregame remarks being so starkly backed up so soon into the game.

The main reason, of course, that this weekend isn't going to be easy is the Marlins. The Cubs were in town earlier in the week having clinched everything they could clinch. They rested some regulars every night. They rested seven regulars Thursday night, and rested them good -- Piniella wouldn't even use them as pinch-hitters. The Cubs played those games as if determined to get the Mets into the postseason -- as if the Mets were the team they most wanted to play next week in the first round.

The Marlins, however, have nothing to play for but the satisfaction of breaking the Mets' hearts. And for them, that's motivation enough.

"This is a big series for us," Marlins manager Fredi Gonzalez said. "We have a team that's not going to the playoffs. So this is our playoffs. Our guys get to finish the season playing in games that mean something."

The Mets say they don't mind that. They're not expecting anybody to roll over for them, and to a man they said they'd be just as driven to play spoiler if the situation were reversed.

The danger only comes if things get personal, as they did on the next-to-last day of the 2007 season, when benches cleared at Shea due to an altercation between Jose Reyes and then-Marlins catcher Miguel Olivo. That got the Marlins fired up -- they offered profane predictions after the game about how badly they wanted to end the Mets' season, and they backed them up with those stunning seven runs against Tom Glavine in the first inning of Game 162.

"We obviously had an altercation with those guys last year, but the guy who started the altercation is gone," Wright said. "It's not personal or about vendettas or anything like that. It's about winning. They want to treat these games like their playoffs, and we want to beat them to get to the playoffs. Simple as that."

As long as it stays as simple as that, it should be okay. But you do have to wonder how much bad blood there is between these teams. Earlier this year in Miami, there was that bench-clearing incident between Pelfrey and Cody Ross. They've played enough to not like each other very much, and those kinds of nasty feelings could threaten to disrupt the pennant race if they were to surface in the coming days.

"I don't think that would be a problem," Jerry Manuel said. "I do think they will pull out all the stops to beat us, just like anybody would. The Cubs thing was different, because they're more worried about them than us. But this is the division, and you give it all you've got. It should be intense."

It promises to be that. The first four pitches of the series' first game were a reminder that the Mets were going to have to get and keep their heads in this thing all weekend or have the season washed away.